


Your Buddy, Carlos Oliveira

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Answering Machine Tag, Cunnilingus, F/M, Getting Together, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Canonical Character Death, Infected Characters, Necrophilia, Post-Resident Evil 3 Remake, Rough Sex, Sentient zombies, Trauma, Under Kinda Weird Circumstances, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:02:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27963473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my number, so call me, maybe.
Relationships: Carlos Oliveira/Jill Valentine
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12
Collections: Mistletoe Exchange 2020





	Your Buddy, Carlos Oliveira

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crookedspoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/gifts).



It’s October 1st, 1998, and it feels like it has been for a long time now.

“Where you going from here?” he asks Jill, and behind her, he can still swear he sees the fireball of the city scarred into the air, still burning.

She looks back with a weary, unhappy smile, turning back toward the big bearded guy. Barry, Carlos thinks, was the name he overheard. “You heard me back there,” she says. “Finishing what my team got roped into getting started.” A wave at Barry, who leans around her into view, giving a grim nod. “Getting to the bottom of everything.”

Her voice is a little thin. He swears that she’s paler than she was when they got on the chopper, and then swears that it’s just the being out of the morning-and-fire light, trying to shake off the cold feeling starting to pour under his skin.

He forces himself to chuckle, as he wanders up a step closer to her. “Serious about moving up from supercop to ace detective, huh?”

“I think I’ve earned the promotion.” There’s a hum and coast of extra sincerity in her tone; a more honest pull in turn to her smile. Reassured (what of?), he lets himself drop out a chuckle, and tells her honestly that he can’t argue with that. She asks how about him, too, and he honestly doesn’t know how to answer that, with it not feeling right to move on to the next contract after Umbrella, after Tyrell and Mikhail, after what Nikolai pulled - but he tells her she doesn’t have to worry about him.

She’s about to head off with Barry and the gal with them - damn, she looks maybe college-age, and his chest cramps, part of it due to thinking that much more about how she’s still apparently got plenty of pals to fight for (and lose, he thinks, and tells himself it’s out of respect for her stakes and not uneasiness). The other part is hesitation. Two parts of thoughts press against each other, and when their horn-lock breaks and one falls forward, so does he. He takes a step that feels far too sudden, as if off of a limp. As he catches himself, Jill backs up, looks him up and down curiosity.

He doesn’t know why he did that, and thinks he might feel guilty for going through with this later, even telling himself he meant what he was about to say at face value. She had plenty of her own to contend with. They’d _both_ be fine.

“But — ” He pauses, taking a breath. Jill’s face doesn’t change. “In case you do anyway…” He pats at the pockets of his fatigues, intending it to be a short check, but then scoffs a shallow laugh at himself, not knowing what he was expecting. “And… if anybody here’s got a pen, by any chance…”

He feels as if he’s been saved from himself, for a second, and given something he can just laugh off. It doesn’t last long before the younger lady’s eyes light up, and she steps forward, fishing in a pouch slung around her hip, eventually producing a pen and a pocket notepad, the latter of which she strips a page out of and lays on top of the cardboard. She hands the items over with a mild and friendly “Here you go”.

Carlos puffs softly to himself as he takes them up. “Much obliged, ma’am,” he says, his smile drawing lengthwise, from both abashed gratitude and resignation.

He scrawls down his number heavily, to focus the sense of vibration in the bone of his forearm into the action itself, rather than let it sit humming out of repeating thoughts. He gives the young cop her stuff back, and hands the leaf of paper, signed with his name, off to Jill. She takes it between three fingers, and looking down at it, her lip subtly purses.

“‘Case you’d like me to put your mind at ease,” he says, fringed with a half-assed conversational shake of a laugh; she flicks her eyes up to him from the paper. “You can give me a ring.” He lifts his hands, and manages to get a smile halfway to the size necessary to look friendly and normal; figuring it’s his time to retreat, not overstay his welcome, he begins to back up. “...Or unless you think I might be any good to bounce off of - about anything that happened in the city.”

 _You can tell me anything,_ he wants to say. _Just say the word. You went through hell of a lot back there. Least I could do would be to follow up. I know you’ve got your own shit to worry about, but_ _I at least am gonna want_ my _mind put at ease._

He doesn’t have the right. They had a good run. They worked well together in a Situation FUBAR. They made it out. She doesn’t owe him anything.

Meanwhile, she doesn’t look annoyed.

The corner of her mouth turns up, subtly, as she turns toward the other two again. “Yeah,” she says, after a moment. Nods a little. Then faster. “Yeah, okay. I’ll keep that in mind…!”

Her voice still sounds a little wan - gives him a prickling chill under the back of his shirt. The lightness to it, however, pushes in against his chest again - hard enough to feel it, hard enough to feel himself breathing; not hard enough to be painful.

He smiles more fully, more heartfully and openly, granted it’s fueled by almost a hundred percent rue. He lifts a hand, and bows a nod. Riding his own spirit, don’t be a stranger rises in his chest, but he smothers it dead.

“...Good to get to know you, Jill,” he says, instead. It flattens and quiets, as he adds, “I -- truly mean it.”

“Yeah,” she says again, slowing to a pause in her tracks. Her smile is gone; he tries not to read into it. “You too, Carlos. I… thanks.”

“See you around.”

Still wandering backward, from a distance, he thinks he sees her face change again, and not in a wilting way, and a warmth begins to rise behind that pressure, even as she doesn’t say anything back - he doesn’t blame her if she doesn’t really know what else _can_ be said, or _should_ be said.

But after a pause, again, midway through turning and trodding up further to her presumed-squaddies, she seems to nod, before in an instant, all he sees is the back of her head, and the backs of the heads of the big cop and the young cop, and both of them marching off like they’re in an action movie to the van waiting a ways away.

There is a feeling of closure in the settlement, and the distance, which likewise feels cool.

Maybe a little bit too cool; he turns, finally, pulling his eyes away and onto a suit behind him last - has some questions, probably - with the chill now spreading with an odd acuteness that puts needles and pins under the skin of his limbs.

But turn, he does, with vibrations in the air trailing behind him struggling against the temperature.

*****

𝙓𝙓𝙓-𝙓𝙓𝙓-𝙓𝙓𝙓𝙓

𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙪𝙙𝙙𝙮,

𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙤𝙨 𝙊𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙞𝙧𝙖

*****

Jill is having the fucking nightmares again.

In all honesty, she knew she would before she _knew_ she would, for whatever amount of sense that made. Certain kinds of moments feel all and unending, when you’re in the thick of them, feeling them press into your every nerve; as soon as they happened, from the mansion onwards, no part of her has ever felt like the seeing things that prove you wrong when you think you’ve seen everything you need to be prepared for would ever leave her. Biting teeth and claws lunging and blood and dead friends out in the woods and something enormous trudging for your blood somehow out of sight so you’ll hear it thundering in your chest just before you see it and bloated shapes slushing around corners underneath layers of a city she thought she knew and imagining her face going dead-dry in the mirror again and again as the T-Virus seized her organs until she couldn’t stay awake. It’s _all_ happened, and she retraces the imprints of it all.

For the most part, she’s tried to numb herself to them. Steel herself. Nightmares can’t hurt you - she should be fine and so she _will_ be. She gets herself up on her hands to feel grounded and catches her breath to remember that she’s not on the verge of death - punches her pillow in thumping repetition to hotly work all the struggle out, amidst fighting growls through her teeth; she goes to the bathroom and takes a shower - cold, at first, so the starkness of the sensation lets her know for sure that she’s awake and therefore out of the belly of the beast (if that’s even a real state of being, at this point); she sees if she can get into contact with Chris, or Rebecca, or Barry, because _no one_ can sleep a full so-much-as-six hours lately, and it at least feels therapeutic that check-ins quickly become superficially normal - questions about what people are doing up that get laughed off with wry non-answers, about finding spots in new neighborhoods to blow off steam (preferably with alcohol).

Even if those typical easily-at-hand measures aren’t always enough on their own to shake the searing blistering adrenaline and panic and clinging skin-prickling feeling of threat off, she’s found herself able to eventually - eventually - tamp the imagery and echoes of simulations down and quieted in her mind during the day. At least until the next night.

For the most part, anyway.

Since that one night, the one in which she’s becoming one of them has been reoccurring and reoccurring and reoccurring - and it’s been more and more rather than less and less that it hasn’t been easily fought off, washed off, burned off.

She wakes and strikes her pillow, imagining not only beating back a tendril but the _sting_ where the stalker’s spine broke off in her arm, and her heart clenches in a fresh shock. She hits the shower, and as she runs her hand over and then eyes a bumpy and darkened spot, it looks too dark, and the area around it too pale; she feels shocked alert by temperature but unclean under the skin, feeling it layered by rotting and crawling and creeping particles. She calls a line picked up by one of the others, her heartbeats hitting just-too erratically, and isn’t able to tell them anything, or ask them anything.

 _Did you sustain any injuries back in the mansion? What about on your way to evacuate? How have you been feeling since then?_ Too obvious - may stress them out worse. Or maybe not obvious _enough_ \- may sound like she was suspicious, with zero grounds, all for a shot in the dark at answering a question she probably didn’t need to be asking, all because she was distracted by feeling _unclean_. Uncertain. Carlos had grabbed her the vaccine.

...She sticks on that word. _Vaccine_.

When she thinks about it, fingertips tugging gingerly at her bicep for closer inspection of the forming scar an inch or two away from them, she becomes _jarringly conscious_ of that rotting, crawling feeling, and hell of a lot less sure that it’s all in her head.

 _Vaccine._ Not _cure._

She thinks about Raccoon City, again. Every street and room and hall of it - as if she needed to exhaust herself with another fucking run through it; the searching for answers where she still can, for now, never stops. Thinks about any and all infected; tries to puzzle out the differences between them, if there were any.

_Carlos._

That didn’t really happen.

_Carlos was infected, just like you._

That didn’t really happen.

_You see it in your dreams still, too._

Just like everything else, true.

Carlos.

...She lifts her pounding head from holding it in her hands, in the afternoon.

She looks up toward the kitchenette. On the counter is a bottle of a fancy flavored vodka Barry had treated everyone to one of in a bittersweet spree the previous Saturday. Maybe it and the casualness of the daytime light will help her get some solid sleep; maybe she can toast with an imaginary Mikhail, to relax that particular sting of survivor’s guilt into a soreness that needs the rest, too.

But first, she has something to do.

She crosses over. Next to the bottle, pinned under its corner, is the paper from Rebecca’s notebook. She tugs it loose, picks it up, studies the numbers.

Carlos.

_That didn’t really happen._

Is she sure it didn’t?

_I don’t think he exactly has lab tech-level intel on how that vaccine was supposed to function, either._

Maybe not,but he _was_ in RC, too.

He knows.

_He knows what?_

Something.

_He knows what?_

Whatever he knows, he _knows._

She holds the paper up to the light.

Your Buddy, he wrote; she isn’t annoyed, but it doesn’t feel much better, realizing she wishes she was in any mood to smile.

She takes it to the phone, time turning.

Mutters to herself that he _did_ say that it was to put her mind at ease.

*****

**October 10th. 1998.**

**You have: 1 new message.**

Carlos? ...It’s Jill. Call me back, whenever you can. All right? My number is [REDACTED]. That’s -- [REDACTED]. ...Just thought I’d check in after all, I guess.

 _[Flatly.]_ ...Hear from you soon.

**END of message.**

*****

**October 10th. 1998.**

**You have: 1 new message. From: Carlos Oliveira.**

...Hey — ace detective. _[Laughs.]_ Not gonna lie - I know, you’ve got a lot to deal with, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if you’d gotten yourself deep into some serious shit already. ...You know, again.

...Don’t worry about catching me with a call back, all right? Like I said, I figure you and your crew are busting ass out there. ...That or taking some sweet time recuperating. _[A sigh, followed by a laugh.]_ ...That — could have sounded better; what I mean is that I wouldn’t blame you. Mm, anyway —

It’s just good to hear from you - Jill.

So…

...How you been holding up?

_[Approx. 3 seconds of silence before the sound of air.]_

**END of message.**

*****

**October 12th. 1998.**

**You have: 1 new message. From: Ace Detective.**

Hey... Carlos. _[A scoff.]_ About your question, didn’t you say you gave me your number so I could check on _you?_ That’s how I _remember_ it, anyway.

...Been better, though! Not like that’s gonna come as a shock.

Question for you, Carlos. ...Did you take any hits from any of the… _things?_ Back in RC? Any of the zombies, or -- anything else? Anything that broke the skin.

Neither of us _really knows_ how T-Virus works. Or even how the vaccine works. It’s just those fucks at Umbrella. I guess I’m… just trying to get myself a little assurance that I am gonna be around as long as it’s gonna take me to do all that… _[Quietly.]_ ...ace detective work… we talked about.

Anyway… don’t read too much into it. All right? Just humor me. If you remember any injuries from Raccoon City, let me know and let me know how your health’s been since then.

Thanks in advance. ...Hope to talk to you soon -- Carlos.

**END of message.**

*****

**October 12th. 1998.**

**You have: 1 new message. From: Carlos Oliveira.**

Hey, again, supercop. _[Laughter.]_ ‘Scuse me - ace detective. Speaking of which, though, I don’t know if we discussed it, but I am just saying, if you did want to, there’d be a million worse things I could be doing with myself than… lend a hand to your cause…!

 _[A breath.]_ Been taking the vacation route myself, lately. The idea of going back to work doesn’t exactly sit normal looking at how my last contract went.

But, uh. _[A pause, followed by a laugh.]_ Enough about that…! Guess I should answer your questions, but… _shit_ , I don’t even remember, Jill. I mean, the city was a disaster area. I don’t think either of us made it out without a few nicks, but — god damn it, so much of the last day in particular is such a blur; I… They came in _swarms_ sometimes. As close as they got, I mean — don’t wanna give you more to worry about. But I’m not gonna lie to you, either. No way of telling which of my scratches were from shrapnel or whatever or which ones could’ve been from nails. So much happened so fast.

I’m sorry, Jill.

_[A long pause.]_

I’m not guessing there’s anything else I can talk to you about, though.

...I know you said don’t read too much into it, but… you been feeling all right?

Catch you later.

**END of message.**

*****

**October 13th. 1998.**

**You have: 2 new messages. From: Ace Detective.**

**FIRST message:**

_[Quietly, laughing(?).]_ You know, first of all, you didn’t answer all of _my_ question…!

I wanna know how _you’ve_ been feeling, Carlos. ...And truth be told? It’s not just to calm down this -- _[Tightly.]_ \-- this fucking _paranoia_ I’ve had over the past two weeks. ...But I’ll get there. I also wanna know because -- ...I don’t know, Carlos. It feels like there are just some things I don’t wanna bother my teammates with. And I don’t even know whether I should be pissed off at myself for it; I mean, it’s not like I don’t know them. It’s not even like it’s not their _business_.

...It’s not easy to put into words. I don’t know. It’s knowing -- we were in the thick of the same disaster, do you get it?

 _[A loud sigh.]_ And if I’m so tightly wound-up now… that means now I’m paranoid for two.

So… call me back soon. All right?

**END of FIRST message.**

**SECOND message:**

_[A scoff.]_ Fuck. ...I’m being a hypocrite, aren’t I. All right, all right, I’ll… rip the bandage off.

Carlos, I ask because… no. I’m not feeling all right, and I don’t --

_[A deep breath.]_

\-- I don’t _think…_ it’s just paranoia anymore. -- No.

...I _know_ it’s not. 

The vaccine didn’t _work_ , Carlos. Or it just slowed it. I don’t know. I can hardly sleep, I haven’t eaten, and yeah, I would just chalk all of that up to stress but -- the wound from when I got infected stopped healing. [Quietly:] Out of nowhere, it’s reopened again. The site around it’s discolored, I can _barely_ feel my hands and feet anymore -- 

_[Whispered:]_ Dammit, Carlos…

...I’m here holed up in this new apartment. ...At first -- I really did think it was all in my head. And now? ...You better believe I wish I’ve been out doing what I need to. Instead, I haven’t seen or -- spoken to anyone else in the past two days, and…!

 _[A sigh, and then quietly:]_ ...Dammit. I haven’t spoken to anyone at _all_ in the past two days. Period. Since my first call, it’s been like we may as well be writing letters.

Yeah. You said not to worry about catching you at a time where you’re able to pick up.

But at this point, I wish you and I could talk, Carlos. ...Hell, I don’t know where you are now but I wish that I could _see_ you. ...Would be a better reminder that if nothing else, I’m not dead yet. ...And that -- someone else is alive, too.

...Before I woke up - on the 1st - I -- _[A pause.]_ ...I had a dream I had to shoot you.

...It keeps happening.

\-- And since I called, it -- ...god, it keeps happening more and more.

...Please just tell me you haven’t been -- ...anything besides _yourself_ since Raccoon, Carlos. I know. [Scoff.] Rich of me to put it that way, when I only first spoke to you two weeks ago, but…

...you know what I mean.

...You said I could call you to put my mind at ease, right?

**END of SECOND message.**

*****

Carlos hasn’t slept.

His afternoon was spent pacing, rubbing his hands down his face and gripping in his hair. He poured himself shot after shot that he doesn’t feel much now - at first, it had been to lubricate an answer as to a response out of his mind, and the answer it apparently arrived upon was “listen to the second message again”. He did, easily at first, as background music to distress, more or less, as he took another shot, and then another.

Now it’s repeating with a cold and somehow dull foreboding, like alarm bells on a compound where nothing good happens.

All the while, he lies on his back, rubbing his face and asking himself questions his brain is fogging out the cause for, lest they become too stark.

_What if I’d been faster? Hell - what if… any of us had destroyed the fucking Big One sooner. (Not that Mikhail, rest in peace, didn’t try, based on Jill’s story.) Yeah? Then -- what if we’d destroyed it before that? Huh? What else could have been less fucked?_

_...God dammit, why did I have to tell her I couldn’t remember?_

That question, in particular, is only easy to ask because he has hazed out the picture behind it.

Suddenly needing to refresh it again, he flops onto his belly and crawls for the phone like a wounded man.

It’s October 14th, 1998, and before the sun, he picks up the phone. He dials in the quick key “ACE”, and selects the first listed option.

Now calling: Ace Detective.

His chest aches at the thought of Jill picking up, and is stung with a stab when he hears the click of the receiver.

Jill’s voice comes in in a sweep. “Carlos?” she says, incredulously; he wishes he could laugh, but merely smiles, apologetically and unseen. “Is that you?”

He nods twice, stiffly, still unseen. “You bet, supercop.”

He slipped up at his own game again. He doesn’t care.

“You sound awful.” Her voice is a strange one part wavering, one part commanding. “Are you --”

He laughs, and isn’t sure why he does it. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” He’s going to tell her that he just hasn’t slept, and then remembers what she’d said about her own symptoms. “...I just, uhh… have a little bit of a hangover,” he says. He smiles in spite of myself, and is sure it’s out of shame at the half-truth.

“Jesus Christ, Carlos, if you’re drunk-calling me, it better not be so bad that you’re not gonna --”

“Hey, hey. I’m fine,” he says, wincing internally at how the repetition might sound, before taking a big breath and forcing the next part all out before he can take it back. “...If you wanna get caught up on how I’ve been lately, though -- it sounds like it’d work out best if we did that in person.”

She pauses.

She pauses, still.

Finally, she asks him if he’s sure. She asks him again, more heavily, pointedly.

“I’m sure I got nothing to worry about,” he says lowly. Hoping she will take him seriously, on both their behalves. For both of their own good.

She pauses.

Still.

She speaks up again, subdued but articulate.

She gives him an address.

“Show up any time after dark,” she says. “Chances are I’ll know that it’s you.”

He agrees and his heart flutters as he does so. Sign-offs are curt; a clack as she hangs up.

So does he, and he falls right into sleep black-and-midnight-blue through the purple of light beginning to glow outside, having nothing, now, to do until nighttime somewhere else.

*****

It is days later.

Night has fallen.

One deathly creak has given into another, and in front of Jill’s door stands the Carlos from her dreams, all oily black mussed hair and shadowed eyes and chalky skin and clothes faded; all blacks and grays and whites and rotted greens and heaviness.

She can say nothing; feel only heaviness wrapping all the way through and around her organs, and root her to where she’s landed back on the sofa.

He ambles forward to her. Moans her name.

Her breath rattles in in an involuntary shudder - the rattle of a snake. She can still say nothing. Her heart should be _pounding_ , terribly, but her entire body, for the time being, insists on being still - all but for her leg drawing up and in, as she drags herself along the living area sofa, arms pulling and pressing at the cushions. Her back hits the armrest, and her head tilts up.

Carlos advances toward her faster, hurtling and catches stumbles of his own weight and driving himself further and further forward and with a sting in her mind she presses herself further back in reflex, picturing that he’ll fall right on top of her. He doesn’t, dropping to his knees beside the couch while she pulls her legs in to her chest, and husks out a “ffffuck…!”

Jill still says nothing.

She watches him as he turns that dead face up to her, eyes two waxing round moons in a disease-choked sky. He reaches out. Takes ahold of one of her ankles - her heart should still be racing. He pulls it; she still does nothing.

When he has her leg outstretched along the couch, he releases it, and it falls heavily and limply. He repeats the other, and again finds no resistance.

He climbs up in front of her, hauling and falling into catching his own weight again as if heavy with weeds like some fabled monster from a pool. Her eyes widen as he gets onto his hands and knees in front of her; he grabs each of her ankles again, and gives them a hard tug, and a stark light flashes in the front of her mind as she pulls to skid laid flat against the sofa, staring up at the gray ceiling.

Her mouth opens and she sucks in a breath she doesn’t even need at cold hands pulling her shirt up over her belly - cool-to-cool. As they stiffly hook under the hem of her sweatpants, and then stretch to hook deeper, under her underwear; she still has feeling there - her stomach shudders and sucks in at the contact. Her shoulders tremble lightly at the air moving over and around her pelvis as it’s exposed.

Carlos rasps her name again.

Her eyes round up at the gray while the air continues to move. She sips in more unnecessary air at a tongue - dry, just-coarse velvet - probing between her lips, flattening to spread them; another breath edges with its sharpness into a gasp at the _exposure_ \- and then it curves against her, and she can feel the tip pressing against such tender flesh, and a moment after she just notes it stopping against the edge, it lashes against her clit.

She feels the shock to her nerves - them jumping and lighting up such that her shoulders twitch and seize again and she pulls in another gasp; wonder of wonders, she also feels the warmth. The pooling in her hips, and the gray of the ceiling begins to richen - green, like the color she remembered Carlos by. He teases her clit again, droning out a breaking moan inches away from her, and again, and again, and the heat builds focused, to a single pressed point from which it blooms and flows outwards. The green richens further, and further, and further; it’s almost as if it’s evening again, in her perception, and she loses sense of time and place before the vibration of the teasing falls away, leaving only the warmth that’s pooled, and the color filling her perception, and her labia twitching, pussy tightening and untightening, while she tries to feel for something. Tries to feel something.

The color over her is blotted out, as up into her vision from below rises a shadow, black and gray and the greens washed out, face exhausted.

She stares wider to take in another shift in sight; pulls in one more gasp. It doesn’t feel effortful this time, or unneeded. It’s natural.

It’s natural when she turns her head up and back to give the dead Carlos access to her neck, the press of teeth and all. It’s natural when she finds her voice again as with a violent shudder over her, he buries himself inside her, her emitting a hitching voiced cry at the suddenness of the filling and stretching the space between her gray legs and behind bones down into its depths and lighting the warmth on fire, pouring it to pool forward until she feels it suddenly so hot in the tips of her fingers and does under dead skin, burning under ash; he draws out of her, and she rasps, and she hitches again as halfway out, she shoves fully back into her again, and they settle together as she wraps tight around him.

He rocks against her again, and again. He moans into her neck, continuing to gnaw painlessly. She hisses at it, still with a layer of voice that sounds very much like hers always has, dull-eyed and seeing only colors. She wraps her arms around him up under his shoulders, biting her teeth together and continuing to tremble at every pull and stroke and push and full settle inside her - at the same time, angling her head away further so she can feel air rustling from out of his open moaning gasping mouth and truly wonder how much of what she’s feeling he’s feeling to, all the while gripping in his matted hair in hooking, blunt grasps attempted to encourage.

How much he feels he needs those breaths. How much he feels his own voice in the repeated mutters of her name. If she feels as warm to him as she does to herself; if he feels warm at all.

She, if nothing else, feels the warmth light up star-bright at one amongst-rapid-gasps abrupt shove inside her that hits a sudden tender spot; her back arches high up against him, head thrown back and sucking in a gasp that certainly feels needful, and the colors start to blur together as they, too, brighten further.

They brighten further, and brighten further, and the heat is constant; he moves against her and the star holds bright too and her legs begin to quiver beneath them and she isn’t sure she’s come when it happens.

Not until she hears herself full and vivid, the one breathing his name out in a sweeping, clearing sigh.

And the colors, still fever-bright, begin to form shapes again, and she falls to rest under him as he continues to move, roughly, over and against her, her knees continuing to twitch.

All the while, she pants and pants freely for breath, all while lying dead-weight still and still open for him to continue working away for himself toward what she’s achieved.

A heart reawakened and pattering and pattering and pattering away in her chest, so hard after so much stillness that she can hear its throbbing in her ears, reminded that she isn’t dead yet.

*****

It is October 24th, 1998.

Jill opens her eyes. She is in bed, a tint of orange glowing in the cracks between heavy-shadow blinds and bleeding over and across the walls and the silhouette of Carlos, very much alive, in front of her. She feels the weight, and nothing else, of his head resting against her forearm.

She smiles, palely but fondly. With a ragdollish move of her free arm, she rests her hand on his head, and plucks at a couple of locks of his shaggy hair before moving it to press gently against his chest, feeling his heart beat in not-dissimilar rhythm to the one she can still feel echoes of in her head.

They are both still alive for the tenth day and counting; it’s become a sad, dry kind of running joke to check in with the other ex-S.T.A.R.S. with that as her first morning report before she sees any of them to talk business, but at least a dry joke is still kind of a funny one.

It isn’t the only reassurance that she’s thoroughly grateful for keeping her sane.


End file.
